The year 2010 was a stormy one for Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy and for France. The president had to contend with the European economic crisis, growing resistance to his economic reforms, low personal poll ratings, financial excess and scandal touching his ruling centre-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party, and defeat in regional elections at the hands of a revived Socialist opposition. Supporters hoped that Sarkozy’s international activism, which had proved popular during the first three years of his presidency, would be the party’s saving grace as France took over the presidency of the Group of 20 (G20) countries in November and of the Group of 8 (G8) in January 2011.

Roma (Gypsies) deported from France in a controversial government crackdown on illegal immigration …

Vadim Ghirda/AP

On Oct. 20, 2010, a man at a demonstration in Bordeaux, France, protests legislation passed by the …

Bob Edme/AP

For the country, an undoubted low point was the French national football (soccer) team’s fate in the World Cup. The French team, a tournament winner in 1998, was eliminated in South Africa without having won a single game. This outcome was not surprising, given the team’s off-pitch performance. After a star player was sent home for yelling at the coach, the rest of the team went on strike and refused to train.

Domestic Affairs

France weathered recession better than some of its neighbours, but voters still showed their discontent in the March regional elections. In the second round of the election, the Socialists and their allies captured 21 of 22 regional councils in mainland France with 53.07% of the vote. The UMP and its allies garnered just 36.22%. The Socialists appeared to have won the votes of almost all those who had voted Green in the first round, while the UMP attracted few defectors from the far-right National Front, whose support stayed fairly solid throughout the polling, finishing with 9.17% of the second-round vote.

In reaction, Sarkozy carried out his first reshuffle of the year in the government led by Prime Minister François Fillon, dropped a proposed carbon tax that evidently had failed to win over Green voters, and backed a government bill to ban full facial coverings—i.e., the burka and the niqab styles of veil worn by some Muslim women—in public places. This last move already had been recommended by a parliamentary committee in January, in the context of a debate on “national identity” that the government had launched in 2009. The ban, passed (with Socialist abstentions) by 335 votes to 1 in the National Assembly and by 246 votes to 1 in the Senate, was justified on grounds of public security. The law was approved in October by the Constitutional Council, but with one amendment: that the ban should not apply to public places of worship lest it contravene the right to freedom of religion.

In the wake of a clash in Grenoble in July between police and youths of North African origin, Sarkozy launched a crackdown on illegal immigration. Linking lax immigration policies to recent outbreaks of crime, Sarkozy soon targeted Roma (Gypsies), mostly from Romania and Bulgaria, who had remained in France longer than the period of residence without work permitted to citizens of fellow European Union countries. The Interior Ministry said that by late August it had closed 88 allegedly illegal camps and deported 850 Roma, mainly back to Romania and Bulgaria. It also warned that French people “of foreign origin” could lose their citizenship if convicted of endangering police.

The French government’s claim that it was acting in a nondiscriminatory manner was punctured by the leak of an Interior Ministry memorandum that singled out the Roma for deportation. The government’s stated defense was that the memo was not official policy, and its author was disciplined. Nonetheless, the deportation campaign continued to be widely criticized within France and internationally, particularly by the European Commission. Viviane Reding, the European justice commissioner, said that she was personally appalled by France’s actions against Roma—actions that she declared were reminiscent of the policies of Nazi Germany. On September 29 she launched legal proceedings against France for infringing EU freedom of movement legislation. This development occurred after an EU summit at which Sarkozy attacked Reding and the European Commission for humiliating France. Yet the president further mired himself in the controversy by telling journalists that Chancellor Angela Merkel had planned similar actions against Roma in Germany—a claim that the German leader denied. By mid-October France had duly undertaken to amend its law, and Brussels dropped the matter.

Meanwhile, the French government continued its efforts to reduce the public deficit by canceling some tax cuts and limiting spending. It aimed to shrink the deficit, which in 2010 amounted to almost 8% of national income, to 6% in 2011 and to 3% by 2013. Sarkozy canceled the annual Élysée Palace garden party on Bastille Day (July 14), as well as presidential hunting parties, and he instructed ministers to cut back on their personal expenses. In July one overseas aid minister was forced to resign for having spent €116,000 (about $148,000) on a private jet to attend a Haiti earthquake reconstruction conference; another minister was dismissed for having charged €12,000 (about $15,000) worth of Cuban cigars to an expense account. But compared with some European neighbours, France’s austerity efforts were more show than substance.

In September Sarkozy pushed through a controversial pension reform that involved raising the minimum retirement age from 60 to 62 and the full-pension age to 67 from 65 by 2018. The reform was expected to halve an anticipated €45 billion (about $58 billion) shortfall in the state pension system by 2020. The change would not be a drastic imposition on the typical French person, whose longevity exceeds the average for industrialized countries. Nevertheless, the idea of reversing the historic decline in the retirement age was enough to bring more than a million protesters to the French streets on September 7. The measure was approved by the parliament in October and by the Constitutional Council in November.

Passage of the pension reform was not helped by the involvement of the pension minister, Éric Woerth, in a scandal surrounding Liliane Bettencourt, said to be France’s richest woman through her one-third stake in the L’Oréal cosmetics group. The affair stemmed from a family inheritance lawsuit that eventually gave rise to allegations that in exchange for a tax exemption, Bettencourt had given Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential campaign €150,000 (about $195,000), an amount 20 times the legal limit. At the time of the alleged tax evasion, Woerth was budget minister and treasurer for Sarkozy’s UMP, and his wife was a financial adviser to Bettencourt until mid-2010. Sarkozy denied any knowledge of illegal campaign donations.

Woerth was sacked in November as part of Sarkozy’s second government reshuffle of the year. The popular Fillon was retained as prime minister, but powerful centrist Jean-Louis Borloo, who held the energy portfolio, quit in disappointment after not securing the premiership; left-wing Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner also quit. Alain Juppé, who had served in the mid-1990s as prime minister, was named defense minister after the departure of Hervé Morin.

Foreign Affairs

The euro zone’s financial crisis shook France, whose banks had lent heavily to Greece, but also appeared to justify the long-standing French call for greater “economic government” in Europe. This argument made headway during the year, though at German insistence it was applied more to tightening budget rules than to any economic policy coordination that might jeopardize the European Central Bank’s independence. One consequence of financial stretch was intensified French interest in defense savings, through both military sales and cooperation with the United Kingdom. France, though once more fully integrated into NATO, agreed in September to sell Russia four Mistral-class warships—the biggest arms sale to Russia made by a NATO country in the history of the alliance. In November France and the U.K. signed two defense cooperation treaties, which involved pooling their resources to, among other items, create a shared aircraft-carrier group, a combined expeditionary force capability, and joint laboratory testing of nuclear weapons.

Sarkozy maintained his claim to be France’s most pro-American postwar president by making several trips to the United States. However, he declined U.S. Pres. Barack Obama’s request for more French troops in Afghanistan. Continuing France’s distinctive contribution to Middle Eastern peace diplomacy, he made efforts to entice Syria into negotiations with Israel by sending Prime Minister Fillon and Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner on successive visits to Damascus in 2010. Having hitherto relatively ignored Africa, Sarkozy made a highly symbolic visit in February to Rwanda, which had accused France of abetting the 1994 genocide, and promised a fresh start in Franco-Rwandan relations. In addition, he hosted 40 African leaders at an Africa-France summit in Nice in late May and early June. On July 14, at his invitation, African troops marched alongside French troops in the Bastille Day parade to mark the 50th anniversary of independence for 14 former French colonies in Africa. (SeeSpecial Report.) Sarkozy also promised to put Africa high on the agenda of his G8 presidency in 2011, but he made it clear that he regarded France’s presidency of the G20, which started on November 1, as more important. Because the wider G20 grouping included all the major emerging countries, Sarkozy said that it had the legitimacy to tackle all the big issues—including reforms to the world’s monetary system, to commodity pricing, and to United Nations governance—that he intended to place before it.